A Killer Read by Erika Chase

So, I would not call myself a cosy mystery fan. When it comes to murder and mayhem I fall somewhere in the middle between cosy at one end and gritty at t'other. Authors such as Louise Penny, Elly Griffiths, Nevada Barr attract me, not too much grimness in there to disturb my equilibrium but enough to thrill me a bit. That said, occasionally I do read a cosy and occasionally I get a surprise. 

 

Lizzie Turner lives in Ashton Corners, Alabama, where she was born and grew up. She's a reading specialist at a local school, helping teachers and helping pupils who're struggling  to read and not interested in books. Along with Molly, an elderly lady who's connected to Lizzie by being a friend of her mother's, she decides to start a new book club in the area - The Ashton Corners Mystery Readers and Cheese Straws Society. Joining the club is Bob, a retired police chief, a lawyer friend of his, Jason, Sally-Jo, a teaching friend, several of the reluctant teen readers Lizzie's been coaching and so on. 

On the night of the first meeting at Molly's home all goes well until Molly and Lizzie suddenly realise they have an intruder. They go out into the hall and a man is there having just walked straight in. He asks to use the phone because his car has broken down. Neither of the women feel comfortable having him in the house as his behaviour is odd and this is borne out when he's killed within ten minutes of leaving - shot dead with a pistol. 

Chief of police in Ashton Corners is Mark Dreyfuss, he was Lizzie's crush at school and this makes her feel rather awkward. She has to get over it though as he's assuming a connection between the dead man and the book club, or, because it's Molly's house he came to, 'her' and the deceased. Lizzie doesn't think this is so and decides to move the investigation along by making enquiries of her own. Which of course makes her a target as she starts getting anonymous phonecalls in the middle of the night, asking her if she knows what story her journalist father was working on when he was killed years ago. And then someone starts to leave parts of a manuscript in her mailbox and the story therein reads like a memoir and is a real tragedy. What's going on? How can Lizzie and the group draw the threads of this complicated enquiry together and get some answers?

Ok, so A Killer Read  is my second book for March. I expected to love the first book and didn't, it was dull. So coming out of that I was looking for something with lots of characters of both sexes with different life experiences, different points of view and of varying ages. Real life! And I got it when I wasn't sure I would. 

How refreshing to have a main character whose love of books leads her to a career with books and young people. Her life is settled but not perfect, after her father died her mother went into a decline, neglecting Lizzie, still a child, and is now in a nursing home with dementia. The scenes where Lizzie and Molly visit are touching. So there is sadness in this book, and challenges. One of the teens Lizzie is trying to help is pregnant and clearly very afraid of something. Lizzie's male neighbour and landlord is clearly lonely, baking and looking out for her, and she realises this and is kind to him. It's nice. 

There's romance, a couple of them actually, but they don't overwhelm the main plot of the search for answers as to who the dead man was and what his connection to the town was. The dialogue is snappy and amusing, I loved all the baking going on and just the sense that these people supported each other and were trying to make life better for everyone. Uplifting, I would call the book. And I liked Lizzie and how she interacted with her friends, trying always to do her best but not always succeeding.

I gather the author, Erika Chase, is Canadian. How someone from Alabama would view the dialogue and its accuracy I wouldn't like to say. But as I'm not, I couldn't tell the difference and thought it was fine. I thought there was a decent but not strong sense of place, enough that I was content though. It did start rather slow and it wasn't until I was about a quarter of the way in that I thought, 'Oh... this is actually not bad!' I liked the mentions of other crime series, some of which I will look up, and I liked how each chapter started with a quote from a crime book by another author.

Of course, A Killer Read  being a book about books never harms and this is my fourth book for the Bookish Books Reading Challenge which is being hosted by Susan at  Bloggin' 'Bout Books. Book 2, Read and Buried, is already on my Kindle, it's set just before Christmas so that's probably when I'll read it. 

I hope you're finding some good books to read in March.